[hansolo77]

I just spent the last 3 days going through my music and properly tagging them all with MusicBrains. Then I spent like 3 hours waiting for Kodi to finish adding it all to it's library. Then when I went to browse for something. There's a whole lot of mixed up metadata. There are duplicate listings (in 2 cases, 3 separate listings) of album artists that should be merged into one, some times if you open an artist, there are listings of everything they're included in (not just their own albums, but compilations where they may have contributed 1 song, etc), some albums don't show any tracks and some don't show their artwork... all kinds of things.

I guess one thing that would really help is if there was some way to bring up the Artist list but have it show the ALBUM ARTIST instead of just all the artists. I've checked, and the setting to list artists from complications is unchecked. So I don't know what to do. Can anyone help me, or at least recommend a program I should try to use to straighten up my library?

Thanks guys! I love Kodi!

[DaveBlake]

Oh dear! If the end result is a mess then I am afraid that means that all is not well with the tagging.

Off in the dev forum I have just been discussing this kind of situation, and saying I don't understand how it happens. So here's the thing, if you are prepared to put in the effort to get your tags sorted, then I am prepared to put in the effort to try and help you.

Shall we start at the beginning: what tool did you use to tag your music? Picard is the default tool for Musicbrainz IDs, but I persoanlly use mp3tag (it can fetch musicbrainz data too).

Also what version of Kodi running on what OS?

A few mistakes can make things look odd, but I am perplexed that disabling the "show artists from compilations" does not reduce the artist list. The implication is that you have not tagged album artist correctly, but I would need to see those tags to know.

[hansolo77]

Thanks for offering your support!

I did in fact use BOTH of those programs. Originally, I've always used MP3Tag as it was so simple to use. I've used it for years. I had used Picard in the past, but hadn't been using it for a very long time. Then I saw some Kodi documentation that indicated they use MusicBrainz as a source for their scraping. So I went through and made sure all my MP3's were tagged using Picard. I then went and double-checked everything in MP3Tag. For starters, I prefer to have leading 0's in my filenames. So I used MP3Tag to give each MP3 it's proper track numbering using xx/xx format. (For Instance; track 04/12 instead of track 4/12). After Picard made it's changes, I took each CD individually and made the changes in MP3Tag. Other things I changed were making sure each CD had an Album Artist. Many of them had more than 1 artist, but were tagged by MusicBrainz as both artists rather than using "Various Artists". (For Instance, rather than Various Artists for Lion King, MB tagged it as "Elton John & Hans Zimmer"). When I saved out the files (using a "/album artist/album/track number - song.mp3" style format) it created a folder for "Elton John & Hans Zimmer" and put the album in there. What it should have done was tag it as Various Artists. When I added that CD to Kodi, and sort by Artists, it shows up under Elton John, Hans Zimmer, AND Elton John & Hans Zimmer. So I now have 3 instances of the same CD in my library. And true enough, if I look at just ALBUMS, it shows up 3 times. Other albums that are indeed listed with Various Artists have the same problem. For instance, I have a 100-track 5-cd Christmas Compilation, where MB tagged it as Various Artists, but also tagged each track with the artist of that track. I picked up on this, and saved out my files in the "/album artist/album/track number - artist - song.mp3" style format so when I look at it in Windows, I can see who the singer is in that song. It looks great in Windows. But in Kodi, for some strange reason it lists those artists (if they exist with their own albums in my collection) with the entire CD. Like, say I have a few CD's by Mariah Carey. She also sung 2-3 songs in the Christmas album. So if I browse Maria Carey's albums, it shows her CD's, PLUS the Christmas one. She's not the album artist, so why should it show that album in HER list?

I believe the problem in both scenarios is that Kodi incorrectly identifies Artist and Album Artist. I have my collection sorted on the server in their proper Album Artist folders. But Kodi seems to completely ignore the Album Artist tag, and associates it's tags with Artist only. Prior to making this change, I was using EMBY. When I added the music folder into EMBY, it had correctly identified the Album Artists, and provided Kodi with the correct information. However, I was finding it extremely difficult to get all the extra art bits (like artist wallpapers, lyrics, etc) while using the CDART MANAGER addon for Kodi. I thought this was because the addon was trying to make changes to the path where the files were being stored, and was getting hung up because EMBY was acting as the middle-man. So I decided to ditch EMBY for music and try using Kodi directly. Now I'm finding that when I added the files into the Library, Kodi was skipping all the embeded tags, and was going out and searching for all the information using the Universal Album Scraper during it's "import". It shouldn't have to do that, since every single track in my collection is properly tagged. I'm thinking Kodi is broken here as well.

So to me, my solution would be to have Kodi NOT parse/scrape metadata from music using anything other than the pre-existing metadata, and to allow sorting by Album Artists only, and not as Artist in general.

[DaveBlake]

What version of Kodi running on what OS?

Some of what you describe gives me ideas of what has happened but I really need to see your tag data to be sure. I think we can get mp3tag to export the tag data to RTF, but need to modify the script to give all the tags. I'll have to come back on that.

The direction of my thinking is this: from Picard you will have MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID and MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID tags, unless you also have ARTISTS and ALBUMARTISTS tags the number of items in those MBIDs need to match the number of names in the ARTIST (TPE1) and ALBUMARTIST (TPE2) tags. If you changed artist or album artist after Picard and did not keep that alignment then odd things happen. Or maybe you have MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST tags as well as ALBUMARTIST? Something is clearly wrong in that area.

I have not used EMBY so can not comment there. Kodi should not use the scraper without you asking it to, although maybe if you are updating rather than starting a fresh it has a setting that is causing that. Anyone else care to chime in on that?

So to me, my solution would be to have Kodi NOT parse/scrape metadata from music using anything other than the pre-existing metadata, and to allow sorting by Album Artists only, and not as Artist in general.

Kodi can do that, that is how I mostly operate. Some of my music has MBIDs, but that of itself does not cause the problems you have, as along as they are consistent. Sadly it is possible that what comes out of Picard is not perfect.

[DaveBlake]

This script can be used within mp3tag to produce a rich text file that documents the way your music is tagged

Code:

$filename(rtf,ansi){\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Tahoma;}}
\viewkind4\uc1\pard\b\f0\fs32 Mp3tag File Overview\par
\b0\fs20 %_date%\par
\par

$loop(%_filename_ext%)Title: \b %title%\b0\par
File: \b %_filename_ext%\b0\par
Artist: \b %artist%\b0\par
AlbumArtist: \b %albumartist%\b0\par
Album: \b %album%\b0\par
Track: \b %track%\b0\par
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID: %MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID%\b0\par
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: %MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID%\b0\par
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID: %MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID%\b0\par
Artists: \b %artists%\b0\par
AlbumArtists: \b %albumartists%\b0\par

MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID: \b %MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID%\b0\par
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID: \b %MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID%\b0\par
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST: \b %MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST%\b0\par
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ID: \b %MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ID%\b0\par
\par
$loopend()
\par
build on %_date%, with \b %_app% - the universal Tag Editor\b0  - http://www.mp3tag.de/en/\par
}

Now all I need to do is explain how to use this!

Within mp3tag....
1) Add export script

Tools>Options menu item. Pick "export" in left hand tree and it will show a ist of default scripts in the right hand box. Click star button on right to create a new script, name it RTF_musicbrainz, paste in the above code, save. Close dialog.

2) Add action to run new script
Actions > Actions displays the Action Groups dialog. Select export, and check that box. Click the edit button and a list of export actions is displayed. First we add a new action - click new, select action type = export and export configuration dialog is shown. Pick RTF_musicbrainz (our script previously created). Set the export file name = musicbrainztags.rtf and click OK. Back on the list of actions remove any other entries. Then OK the configuration too.

3) Run script for a folder
Set the directory to a music folder (say the artists or albums that you have problems with) and let the list of files populate. Select all the files then click Action>Export . You will get a completion messge and musicbrainztags.rtf will be created in the music folder.

Send me the rtf files, depending on size use paste bin etc. May need to rename them if you do artists/albums separately.

Hope that is enough detail for you to follow the task!

[hansolo77]

Here's my Lion King example.

http://pastebin.com/1z0WVsSw

I ran into a problem with Step 2. I don't have "Export" as an option in the Action Groups. So I just used the File menu's Export after creating the new export script.

Looking over it, it looks like it doesn't have a musicbrainz album artist, only the ID numbers. Maybe I need to reconfigure Picard and make sure it is saving that information.

[DaveBlake]

Great, now I can see your tagging I can advise you better.
Going to assume to are on Isengard. Earlier versons have more problems with this area.

Lack of musicbrainz album artist is not problem, If there it simply replaces ALBUMARTIST but, you have that tag and personally I prefer to have one tag for the job rather than two, less confusing.

Also don't worry about MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID etc. (the tags with underscores) that is what is used in FLAC files, so silly they are slightly different names from ID3. That is another easily made mistake.

One obvious issue is the miss count between ALBUMARTIST and MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID without ALBUMARTISTS tag to resolve the differences.

For example (the significant tags only):

Title: Circle of Life
Artist: Carmen Twillie with Lebo M
Artists: Carmen Twillie/Lebo M
MUSICBRAINZ ARTIST ID: 39331b2f-9df0-4de1-a3ee-c28dd103045c/a966b097-7981-40c5-82b4-79c6fe28932c

AlbumArtist: Elton John & Hans Zimmer
AlbumArtists:
MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST ID: b83bc61f-8451-4a5d-8b8e-7e9ed295e822/e6de1f3b-6484-491c-88dd-6d619f142abc

Kodi needs " / " as separator, the spaces matter. Change that and song artists "Carmen Twillie" and "Lebo M" with their MBIDs will go in the library (from ARTISTS tag) but "Carmen Twillie with Lebo M" (from ARTIST) will be displayed when playing, or as song details in lists as an artist description.

But albumartist.... Kodi tries to match up single artist "Elton John & Hans Zimmer" to 2 MBIDs and gets in a pickle. There are two ways to fix this
a). Change ALBUMARTIST tag to "Elton John / Hans Zimmer"
or
b) Add ALBUMARTISTS tag = "Elton John / Hans Zimmer" and leave ALBUMARTIST as it is.

Same is true for the other tracks.
Then you will have this album under Elton John and Hans Zimmer as separate artists.

Try it out and see if that fixes things. I will try to help with any other questions.

[scott967]

This kind of problem is why I gave up on ID3 tags (though v2.4 probably works -- not all programs like 2.4 tags) and used MP3tag to copy all the tags into APE2 for mp3 files. Then I use the prioritiseapetags setting in advancedsettings.

scott s.
.

[DaveBlake]

I can't see how switching tag format helps, same tag content same issues regardless of format. Personally I use FLAC for sound quality, but it is the value of the tags that matters here.

[hansolo77]

Would it help if I change the ALBUM ARTIST tag to just "Elton John" or even "Various Artists" instead of having both artists? I think I'd prefer to have it listed on just one, rather than have an artist list the same CD as another artist. This would be beneficial to me as from my Mariah Carey example where she sung 2-3 songs in the christmas album. I'd prefer to just see HER albums, and not list her "supporting role" albums.

I'm actually off the next 3 days from work, so I'll have some free time to mess with this more. In the mean time, I will try that " / " (with the spaces) and see if it helps. I do recall seeing a setting somewhere about that.

[DaveBlake]

Would it help if I change the ALBUM ARTIST tag to just "Elton John" or even "Various Artists" instead of having both artists?

No!!!! The number of MBIDs would still be different to the number of artists! It is the mis-match between ALBUMARTIST and MUSICBRIANZ ALBUM ARTIST ID that is the problem, a different mis-match will not help.

What have you got against Hans Zimmer?

If it would completely upset you to have Hans in your list of (album) artists then you can change the tagging (more than one tag has to change) to remove him, you can remove Elton too if you like. But if you then scrape additional album info he could come back or make a mess (not sure which). Basically you are free to customise tag data, but if you do then don't scrape.

I think I'd prefer to have it listed on just one, rather than have an artist list the same CD as another artist.

Well if you are sure, personally I can't see what is wrong with that. But I remember that you started all this so you could get better scraping results, and this goes against that. Can I suggest that you try the change I suggested first and see how it looks.

Then if you really want to get rid of Hans then change both ALBUMARTIST and MUSICBRIANZ ALBUM ARTIST ID tags on all tracks to have just one matching item each. Elton is easy, for VA you need to look up the MBID for various (there is one)

This would be beneficial to me as from my Mariah Carey example where she sung 2-3 songs in the christmas album. I'd prefer to just see HER albums, and not list her "supporting role" albums.

Paste up the tags for this album too. If you have set the albumartistonly flag (disable the "include artists from compilations" setting) then you will not see supporting role artists. Maybe something else is up with the tags in this case, so show me.

I'm actually off the next 3 days from work, so I'll have some free time to mess with this more. In the mean time, I will try that " / " (with the spaces) and see if it helps. I do recall seeing a setting somewhere about that.

Let us know how you get on. There will be others that have similar problems, our discussion here may help them in the future.

[scott967]

I can't see how switching tag format helps, same tag content same issues regardless of format. Personally I use FLAC for sound quality, but it is the value of the tags that matters here.

The problem is ID3 v2.3 only has a defined (in band) item separator for artist and composer frames. So most tagging software obeys the spec for those two frames, using "/", but then define their own separator for other frames, and using "/" everywhere causes problems (the so-called AC/DC problem). Coming up with a separator that Kodi and other software accept is difficult. Using v2.4 gets around that because a unicode null is defined as a separator in all frames. But support for v2.4 in software is kind of spotty. That's why I use APE, which avoids separator issues without messing with ID3 v2.3 tags that other software needs.

scott s.

[DaveBlake]

Thanks for clarifying Scott.

Hansolo get any further with your tags? Want me to have a look at the Xmas feat. Maria Carey albums?

[hansolo77]

Actually I ended up getting sidetracked this week and didn't have much time to work on it. I had a problem too where I couldn't browse to my server's shares. Kodi would lockup or timeout after I selected the server before it would list the available share folders. I managed a workaround by manually typing the full path as a source. Other than that, I've just been busy with other things and haven't spent any more time with it. I will report back what's going on when I get the chance!

[hansolo77]

I'm going through my music now that I'm on vacation in an attempt to resolve my issues. I'm going through my artists, one at a time. Properly tag with MusicBrainz then go back over it with MP3Tag (for some strange reason, MB doesn't save the genre..?). After everything looks like it should be correct, I then move them all to a temporary folder and add that folder into Kodi's Library. Check each album out, and if everything looks correct, I remove them from the library and move the files to a new permanent location. Now for the new issues:

1 - Multi-Disk albums. I'm up to the letter C and have my first multi-disk release. It has 4 disks. MusicBrainz correctly tagged it, identifying each track to each disk, and saved them out into a sub-folder for each disk. However, when I add them into the Kodi library they're displayed linearly. Meaning, it's lists all the track 1's, then the track 2's, etc.. rather than 1-16 then 1-12, etc. Is this merely an incorrect setting in Kodi, or is this something I'll just have to live with? Should I re-tag the albums to say "Disk #" in the actual album name? I hope not.

2 - Read-Only. It looks like Kodi has some pretty power scrapers to go in and identify the various things about my music. Is there any way to make sure these things aren't changed in my files? For instance.. I've gone through the trouble up locating and saving the highest resolution scan of Album Art I could find. If Kodi's scrapers go through and find something different or of lower quality, will it change them? I'd prefer to keep the one's I've embedded myself. I also went through and added zero padding to my track numbers. So instead of seeing them as 1, 2, 3.. it shows as 01, 02, 03. I think this looks nicer when browsing the files directly on a computer, and eliminates the possibility of maybe listing as 1, 10, 2, 20, 3, etc. Because of that, I'm afraid if I let Kodi scrape internet data (using the "prefer online data" flag) it will change these again, and I don't want that.

3 - MusicBrainz. This is also related to #2. When I go through and get my music tagged and renamed, it saves the tag data for track numbers without zero padding. It's getting old having to go through and re-tag everything again to get those zero's in place. Is there a way to configure MB to include those? Also, MB doesn't seem to save the Genre tags in my music. I know their database has that information, because when I search for an album through the web, I can see the Genre just fine. Any ideas why it's not scraping and saving that information in my tags?